Left-handed colouring on a tablet

The problem is occlusion: your hand covers the part of the canvas you are about to work on. For a left-hander that is the lower left, which flips two pieces of standard advice exactly.

Almost every piece of advice written about using a tablet assumes you hold the stylus in your right hand. Most of it is still useful to a left-hander, but only after it has been mirrored, and a fair amount of frustration comes from people trying to follow it literally. It is worth working out what actually changes, because it is less than the internet implies and more specific.

The real problem is occlusion

On a screen you touch, your hand is between your eyes and the picture. Whatever it covers, you cannot see. For a right-hander the covered area is the lower right of the canvas; for a left-hander it is the lower left. That single mirrored fact generates almost every difference worth knowing about, and it has two consequences that run in opposite directions.

The good one: bottom-right controls stay clear

App designers, being mostly right-handed, tend to park palettes, zoom controls and action buttons in the bottom-right area, and right-handers spend their lives covering those controls with their own hand. For you they sit in the one corner your hand never visits. This is a genuine advantage and it goes unnoticed because nobody complains about a problem they do not have.

The bad one: working left to right hides your own work

Here is the one that costs you time. If you work across a picture from left to right, the way you read, your hand travels across the area you are moving into and sits on top of the region you just aimed at. You lift to check, you place again, you lose the thread. A right-hander working left to right has their hand trailing behind the work, covering only what is already finished, which is exactly the arrangement you do not get.

So invert it. Work right to left across the picture, and your hand trails behind the front of the work in the same way. It feels wrong for about five minutes because it fights the reading habit, and then it stops feeling like anything.

Three things to change

1. Work right to left, and bottom to top within an area, so the hand follows the work rather than leading it. This is the largest single improvement available and it costs nothing to try.
2. Rotate or pan so the active area sits above your hand rather than under it. On a tablet you have room to move a picture around freely, and putting the region you are working on in the upper half of the screen removes the occlusion problem entirely for as long as you stay there.
3. Turn the tablet itself if you like. Some people find that rotating the device thirty degrees or so anticlockwise puts the wrist in a more natural position and moves the covered wedge out of the way at the same time. There is no correct angle; the point is that the device does not have to sit square to the table.

A fourth, smaller one: if you rest your hand on the screen while working, the natural hooked wrist position that many left-handers use for writing puts the heel of the hand somewhere unexpected. It is worth noticing where yours lands, because it determines which part of the canvas is hidden and therefore which direction of work is comfortable.

Styluses and palm rejection

Palm rejection — the ability to rest a hand on the screen without it registering as touches — works by distinguishing a large soft contact patch from a small firm one. That distinction has nothing to do with which hand the patch belongs to, so palm rejection is generally handedness-agnostic and works the same for you as for anyone. If you have been told otherwise, it is folklore.

What is not handedness-agnostic is where the operating system decides to put things relative to the pen. Several systems have a left-hand or right-hand setting that controls which side context menus, tool palettes and pop-ups appear on, so that they do not open underneath your hand. It is usually buried in the pen or accessibility settings, it is set to right-handed by default, and switching it is a two-second change that quietly fixes a class of small annoyances you may have stopped noticing.

Mirror the advice, do not obey it

The general rule for reading anything written about tablet technique: assume it was written by a right-hander describing what works for them, and flip every direction in it. Advice to work left to right becomes right to left. Advice to keep the bottom-left of the canvas clear becomes bottom-right. A recommendation about where to park a palette should be reversed rather than followed.

This sounds obvious written down and is routinely not done, because directional advice reads as though it is about the picture when it is really about the body of the person who wrote it. Once you start mirroring automatically, a great deal of guidance becomes useful that previously seemed simply wrong.

• Advice about hand position, work direction and screen layout: mirror it.
• Advice about zoom, brightness, artwork density and session length: take it as written, since none of it has a handedness.
• Advice that insists there is one correct way to hold a stylus: ignore it. Grip variation among left-handers is wide, and comfort beats conforming to a diagram.

One last practical note. If you use a case or a stand that props the tablet at an angle, check that the hinge or the cover flap is not on your working side. Right-handed design assumptions show up in accessories more often than in software, and a flap that sits under your left forearm is a slow, low-grade irritation that most people put up with for years without identifying.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• Colouring one-handed on a phone
• Finger vs stylus for colouring apps
• How to colour tiny numbered regions

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